How to make photos just like me

I received an email from someone recently, wanting to know the specifics of my technique for shooting dance photos. Specifics, as in my ISO setting, my shutter speed, my flash settings. He wanted to know how to make photographs that looked like mine.

I don’t feel especially threatened by this. I could reveal all my state secrets, as if I have any, and it wouldn’t make a bit of difference. His pictures would not look like mine, not if he mimicked my camera settings to the last f stop.

For one thing, I never do just one thing. I’m all over the map with how I do my dance pictures anyway. I have shot on transparency film, on negative film, and on digital. I use high ISOs and low ISOs. I shoot with a flash, and without. I shoot at slow shutter speeds and fast. I pan and I don’t. I’ve done a little bit of all kinds of techniques. Sometimes all of them have worked. Sometimes nothing works. Sometimes I’m just off that night.

There are people who think it’s equipment and technique. Any photographer who has mastered their equipment and technique knows that craft matters. But it’s not the deciding element. What this person who wrote me didn’t understand is that he wasn’t going to get successful photos by following a recipe.

With the dance work (and I suppose with most all of my photography), it works when I reach a measure of attunement with the energy of the room. Because I’m a dancer, I know what elements of the form are going to be particularly rich visually and I can anticipate them. But most important, I can tap into that sense of the photograph coming together before I even know that it is, and respond to that instant. Faster than I can consciously do so. Yes, I may understand how I’m composing a particular image while in the flow, but there is so much dynamism that the moment is too complex to respond to consciously. I have to trust that a smarter part of my brain than the one that thinks it knows where the photograph is, is going to know when to make the exposure. It’s about knowing how to reach that state of attunement, and knowing the visceral clues that tell you you’re there.

Comments

[Adrian Malloch]

Nice post. A few weeks ago I was being pestered during a shoot for a local upmarket city magazine with similar questions. I guess I was flattered and I always welcome discussion about photography but the inquisitor was desperate to know what sort of settings I was using and how she could copy what she had seen of my previous work. I think I exasperated her with my weird answers which mirror what you have written here. The thing that really weirded her out was my explanation of how with all my photos I'm most in the zone when I dance with the subject. Mostly its a metaphorical reference but I constantly find myself bobbing and weaving both in response and in anticipation of what I see and feel around me. "But what sort of shutter speeds do you use?". " Umm… well, er… anything that works… or doesn't… or, Hell! I don't know!"

[Doug Plummer]

Adrian,

Nice story. There are people who need absolute answers. They're not going to be very good at improvisation.